


the line (so say we two)

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Battlestar Galactica References, Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts, Dreams, Feelings Realization, Getting Together, Inspired by Music, Love Confessions, M/M, Sparring, a gift for fandom friends, brotherhood-era gladnis, love in the time of duty, the long slow sweet process of falling in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 04:43:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15987869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Gladiolus wakes up from a strange dream of another world, another place, another time, and another set of agonizing choices.But he wakes up and finds himself looking into Ignis's eyes, and -- maybe he sees his own hopes, his own thoughts, mirrored there.





	the line (so say we two)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [johanirae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/johanirae/gifts), [LinaKuma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinaKuma/gifts).



> The dream that Gladio has -- is modified from the "red line" speech in the modern Battlestar Galactica series. Watch the speech [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie66Uf3PVM8), and listen to the isolated musical track [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAjfL2KFFBM).
> 
> I wrote this when I realized that an entire flock of friends in FFXV fandom were born, like me, in September -- so I decided to write a sort of birthday gift for all of us :)

Burn in his nose, the acrid bouquet of a garage, white-razed metal and something that smells even more powerful than petrol. He almost throws up a hand to cover his nose, to cover his mouth -- it’s hard to breathe -- but he can’t see all of a sudden. He can’t feel the movement of his own arm. He can’t feel his feet planted on the ground, right foot shifted forward in case he has to move -- something must be wrong, he thinks, something must have gone wrong and he almost yells, almost tries to raise his voice to call for help -- 

No, now he’s moving and he can see and he -- has no control over himself. He can’t turn his head to assess this location; he’s moving and he can only see -- strange colors. People in yellow, with black stripes running down their shoulders; and in orange, with their stripes in clashing yellow-green. People in drab grays, in faded browns, one-piece suits with too many patches and repairs and fraying threads. Here and there, men and women in clothes made of clashing materials -- the patterns don’t match and the seams are too obvious.

In fact, the only people he sort of recognizes are the ones muffled in black. Armor, or something like it, from head to toe, and helms with too many corners. Hands clutching at high-powered firearms.

Carrying them? Why can’t they just -- draw them out of an Armiger?

Is there even an Armiger, here?

And he wonders: is he dreaming? Is this some other place that isn’t Insomnia? There’s a pulse all the way down below him, a pulse that isn’t his, a deep dark throb and there’s a voice in his head telling him he’s on the move -- he’s in a large place on the move -- and the distant whining noises he can hear from very, very far off aren’t part of this place, are separated from it, and maybe there’s a lump in his throat that tastes like fear -- 

Movement at the packed end of the hall. A woman, followed by two men. They’ve come in from somewhere else and they’re not really walking -- they’re marching, three sets of heavy echoing footsteps, as they turn to face everyone else -- and with a start, he recognizes the expressions on their faces, the grim light in their eyes.

They are leaders, they are officers, and they are respected, and he wants to stand up straight and he wants to pay attention. He sees the woman in her jacket and the intricate straps of holsters for the guns she’s carrying at her hips. He sees the young man in the suit that’s maybe a little too large for him, a little too slouched in the shoulders. 

And he sees the old man climbing up onto a narrow silver platform and -- that’s not his father, that’s not the Marshal, that’s not the King -- that man with the scars in his face and the obvious silver in his hair and the blue uniform, the golden buttons. Stocky, almost stooped, almost like someone who might wind up and throw a punch -- he looks almost like a statue climbing back onto its pedestal.

He’s moving closer -- still not of his own free will -- close enough to see the symbol on that man’s chest, like wings, like the tattoo that’s just barely healed in his own skin, and then -- somehow time skips forward or he loses time, and now that man is speaking: 

_Let there be no illusions! This is likely to be a one-way trip -- so don’t volunteer out of sentiment or emotion._

A voice like thorns and blade-edges and broken stone, pointing out a line in the deck -- but what is a deck? -- and a choice to go to one side of the hall or to the other.

One side of the hall, for the people who want to fight -- the people going on the one-way trip.

The other side of the hall, for the people who want to stay here and -- then what? So what if they stay? Is there safety in staying here?

Looking at the faces around him: he doesn’t recognize anyone in this crowd, there’s not a single familiar face to be found, but he knows, in a painful blunt heavy way, the weight on every single set of shoulders that he can see.

The crushing weight of despair.

The stale sweat, the reek of fear, the salt-stains of weeping and no one to wipe the tears away.

What does it mean to be on one side of this line in the deck or the other -- when even the old man, when even the man and the woman who’d walked in with him, look exactly as fearful as the little girl clutching a blue rag to her chest. As the old man who shudders violently, his cane threatening to crack itself into pieces with every heave of breath. As the woman in the bloodstained shirt and trousers and shoes who is propping up an unconscious boy, rough-slashed bandages wrapped around his thin chest.

He doesn’t know which side to take, and he watches -- the body he’s in watches -- silent and fearful as the old man steps off the platform.

Footsteps on the move, as heavy as inevitability, he thinks: and people are crossing the line. The young man in the suit is only the first one to move, and he stares at the old man as he passes him, before dropping his eyes and continuing on his way. 

Following him: a woman in a beautiful dress that exposes her shoulders, her hair golden-white and beautiful, her face twisted with anguish. The people with the firearms move in a ragged mass. Men and women in various uniforms -- and men and women who aren’t in uniform, too. Some of the people carry boxes and bags, and some of them are empty-handed, and many of them hesitate, before taking their places.

He watches as the old man who’d been on the platform stops a white-haired man in faded green from crossing the line, and then steps forward to help a shivering thin woman with limp long hair.

Shaking and pale-sallow as she is, she still ends up on the side of the line for the people who want to fight -- and the woman with the guns puts an arm around her, as though to keep her standing up.

And he thinks he wants to choose, he thinks he knows what his decision ought to be -- he strains to take that step and then -- 

“Are you all right? Gladio.”

He can move again: he can open his eyes and the world smells and feels familiar. The world that he knows, the constant draft, the golden light streaming in from the windows high up near the ceiling. Weapons displayed on the walls, weapons racked and waiting in their corners. He thinks he can hear the rustle of the banners hanging from the beams in the ceiling. Stone floor beneath him, damp beneath his shirt where it’s still stuck to his skin -- cold and warm at the same time.

A foot wrapped and compressed in bandages is stopped next to his hip. Fingers on his wrist, warmth, contact -- and he knows he’s going to see Ignis when he tilts his head. The tufts of his hair, and the frames of his eyeglasses, and the thin line of his mouth. White tank top, and baggy gray sweatpants. 

He thinks of Ignis wearing the blue suit of the young man in his dream, and -- it doesn’t fit him at all, though that position at the front of the hall does.

“I think I’ve overdone it,” he hears himself say, suddenly.

“For once I’m inclined to agree with your self-assessment.”

He grasps the hand that’s offered to him. Meets Ignis’s eyes with a tiny nod -- and in a single powerful movement of uncoiling muscles and strength he’s picked up from the floor, and he’s on his feet and Ignis is pulling away and standing right before him.

He thinks that he might well be the one single person in the Citadel, the one single person in the entirety of Insomnia, who believes, who _knows_ , the raw strength that Ignis has pushed himself into developing, in only the past few years of concentrated weapons-training.

He glances at Ignis’s bare feet. At his own battered sneakers.

For a moment he thinks he sees a line drawn between them.

And Ignis continues to move, continues to recede, quicker than that thought, and Gladio watches him stride to the racks. Polearm, and the blunted head, and Ignis is speaking: “I must ask you to step aside.”

“Can I watch?”

Piercing glance, followed by a swift nod. 

The practice sword in his hands is heavy, and sweat-slick on the extended grip.

It’s hard to breathe. He’s tense all over. The echoes of the dream, the reason he even had it in the first place -- the realization of having been dreaming, only to wake and find himself looking into the eyes of Ignis Scientia. It’s enough to make his heart knock against his ribs -- and not because he’s tired, or because he’s torn between taking up his sword-forms once again, and really actually settling down to watch -- 

The quiet piercing _crack_ of a polearm’s impact on the stone floor breaks that train of thought and forces him to look up -- 

Shoulders and arms and hands on the move, and a body twisting and turning, and he’s reminded once again of how the entirety of the staff-like object in Ignis’s hands is a weapon. Crack, louder, of the butt of that same weapon against stone, and then Ignis is leaping and spinning in mid-air, and the polearm describes widening and widening arcs in the air as he seems to fend off a swarm of imaginary attackers. Attackers on the ground, repelled in spiraling strokes; attackers in the air, swatted away, the length of the weapon completely in use, not an inch of it held back.

Just as quickly as he’d started, sweeping and slashing -- Ignis seems to switch tactics, seems to be fighting at extremely close range, and now it’s the head of the polearm in play, jabbing and striking and parrying.

More than just the actual physical weapon itself -- Gladio catches a glimpse of the live edge in Ignis’s eyes, behind the spectacles, behind the falling-down fringe of his hair. A glimpse of the power of him, that whirls and whirls in razor-sharp edges in him and around him, tangible like magic, and about as addictive -- and that thought is like his own sword running through him, spearing him through, jolting him into action.

And as he hadn’t been able to do in the dream, as he hadn’t been able to move himself, he picks up his sword and rushes forward, thoughts on the move, surge and strike and the movement isn’t in his mind any more. The movement is in his muscles and nerves, completely bypassing his own higher functions, swing and slash and side-step just as thoughtless as breathing, the knowledge that now purely lives in his body, honed to song-sharp instinct -- and of course he’s braced for impact, of course he knows right from the first step that he’s going to be met with a parry and the swift following counterattack -- it’s just that he’d expected to still be on his feet, knowing Ignis, knowing the way Ignis blocks, knowing the pure power of him --

So to be on his knees, so to be looking up once again into a stern face, into resolution and drive, catches him by surprise.

“Shall we continue?”

Kind, kind, those words are quiet and caught on the edge of steady controlled breaths.

Words that are weapons, too.

He doesn’t know he’s going to speak until he does -- until the words fall out of him. “Why are you doing this, Ignis? This whole -- thing. This whole life of yours.”

“Beg pardon.” Clipped tight sound of him.

“I think I knew what I was getting into, even when I was kid-stupid, even when I actually couldn’t know any better,” he says, he gasps. The words are clogging in his throat. He has to try and get them out in the right way. There’s a frantic need rising in him, the longing to be understood.

The longing for Ignis to understand him, even as he keeps talking: “I knew I wanted to be like Dad, and like Mom. I didn’t know what it meant to _be_ them. I didn’t know what they were actually doing. But I wanted to do what they were doing, and I wanted them to tell me that I was doing the right thing. That I was good.”

“I did not wish to follow in anyone’s footsteps. I had no one I wished to follow,” Ignis is saying -- and he’s letting up on the polearm. He’s stepping away. 

Thump of another impact -- of Ignis planting the butt of his weapon on the stone -- and he seems to come to rest against the tall shaft. Seems to bow his head. “I did not really understand what it meant to be special, to be chosen, because I was too lost in my books. Because it was a fine thing to be lost in the books, in the facts. It was a fine thing to learn. That was all I could see, as a child. I did not know what it meant. I did not know what it would lead me to.”

He has to lean on his sword to get to his feet. “So when Regis came to you -- ”

“I had to think about what he was asking me to do. I had to try and really understand. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. And I came to this place, undecided, until I met Noct.”

“Yeah,” he says.

Ignis is looking up, is meeting his eyes. “And then I was standing next to the throne. I was shaking Noct’s hand. It was like being pulled over a line in the stone -- I hadn’t even known that there had been one -- but there was a line, and I crossed it. And I was no longer the same person who had entered the throne room.”

In the dream, Gladio knows, Gladio remembers, that he had wanted to cross the hall. He had wanted to join the smaller group of people. 

And what had been in their minds, he wonders in the here and now, on hearing the choices, on being made to decide there and then? 

How was that like -- his own experience, and like Ignis’s? How was it different?

Because the line he’d crossed, in his past, in his actual life -- it hadn’t been between him and Noctis.

He can only see that line now, in his hasty recollection, and where it had been, and how easy it had been to cross.

And on the other side -- 

“If I might be so bold as to ask: what brought that on?”

He makes himself meet Ignis’s eyes again. “How many times have you felt like that? Like crossing a line?”

Again he sees the shift in Ignis’s shoulders, tension coiling and uncoiling and returning.

The light falling into this hall is turning cold and pale and wan, and it throws something like a mask across Ignis’s features. The line of his eyebrows, the tic in his jaw, the pinch in the corners of his eyes. All of him is shrouded in the falling darkness.

And just a few moments ago Ignis had been alight, had been grace and strength, all but in flight with the polearm in his hands, swift and certain power, carefully harnessed and controlled.

Now he’s frozen and unsure, and Gladio opens his mouth because maybe he’s the reason for Ignis freezing like this and he -- he shouldn’t have done that -- he needs to apologize -- 

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He blinks. Feels his mouth fall open, a little. 

Ignis’s words are a subdued hum.

But he’s right and -- it’s a relief, it’s a strange kind of feeling, like jumping out of a window, like dragging his fingers down the edge of a sword and always running the risk of slicing himself open, staining the steel with his blood -- and he tells him the truth. 

He owes him the truth.

“That was my dream. I was being asked to cross a line. One-way mission, and if I made one choice I was -- likely to die, but I’d be helping someone else live. If I made the other choice, it was even more of a toss-up -- I might live or I might die.

“I wanted to help. I wanted to fight so someone else could survive. So I wanted to choose that. Even if I’d been likely to die, in the dream.” He tries to grin. Tries to laugh, but all he can do is point his thumb at his own face. “Not like I don’t know what that means in real life.”

He still feels that live edge in his skin, sometimes. He still tastes his own blood on his tongue, dripping from his face, from his almost-injured eye.

“And you wanted to know -- what exactly?”

“I wanted to know what choice you’d make. And why, why you’d choose the more dangerous road.”

Flick of a pale-brown eyebrow. “Assuming that I did indeed make that choice.”

That makes Gladio grin, a little, in a dark sort of humor. “Who said anything about assuming? Don’t tell me you didn’t choose. Because if you didn’t, then why are you training? What’s with all the knowledge of tactics? You fight my enemies. My opponents. Anything that stands before me on the field, stands before you, too. Beasts. Daemons. Assassins. Enemy soldiers.”

“Anything and everything that would get in the way of Noct and -- his goal.”

“Yup.”

He watches Ignis bow his head, then.

Hears him say: “Crossing the line to Noctis -- that was the first time, for me. Only the first. I was not expecting to cross another, but -- I did.”

Some instinct makes Gladio put his sword down and away, laying it onto the floor, but he keeps looking at Ignis. He doesn’t break eye contact.

As Ignis shifts his feet, and shifts the polearm, so he’s holding it behind his own back. “I was holding something else, when I first met you. Do you remember what it was?”

Gladio smiles, and takes a small step forward. “Yeah. I borrowed that book from you after. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Come now.” Ignis is smiling, too, small and real. “We had a row about it, when you returned it.”

“You can quit being polite. I know for certain we scared the shit out of Noct. Didn’t stop you though. You kept telling me to read something else, and something else, and something else after that,” and he thinks of spending the long silent hours around midnight in some study or another, tucked away and reading next to Ignis, who was always focused on his own books, on his own notes.

He thinks of -- the nights of the two of them always waking up tangled together from all those hours of studying. Books surrounding them, like half-hearted forts, like walls of words. The sleep-flush on Ignis’s face that seemed to fade away quickly. The warmth that always lingered in his own chest.

Warmth that had seemed to come from Ignis’s hand, slack against his, the brush of skin against skin that had become familiar through those nights. 

And he snaps back to reality because of that same hand, reaching out to him, brief contact that -- he doesn’t want to let that go, not this time.

So he watches their hands meet: his hand, palm up; and Ignis’s, palm down. Contact, just barely, in the space between them. 

“If you’ll permit me to cross this particular line -- ”

“Any time you want,” he says, and he knows he means the words.

He also knows he wants something more out of this, and so he steps around. Places himself at Ignis’s side.

And he can’t help but swallow, can’t help but brace himself, when he moves his hand a little.

When he interlaces their fingers, Ignis is warm and vital and sweaty, but he stays right where he is, and doesn’t even attempt to put any space between them.

Gladio thinks he might be pressing closer, subtly.

Brush of Ignis’s thumb against his.

“This is almost familiar,” he hears Ignis say, almost whispering. 

“Yeah it is,” he says, just as quiet.

“You don’t mind?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t. I couldn’t. I’ve wanted to do this.”

The room plunges suddenly into darkness and he’s left seeing only the vague outline of Ignis beside him.

That’s all right: the solidity of Ignis’s hand in his is more than enough of an anchor. More than enough to keep him going, more than enough to be going on with.

More than enough that it’s easy to say it out loud: the thing that they both already know. The thing that they’d agreed upon, in those nights and in those conversations over books, over weapons, over Noct: 

“Duty first, right.”

“Now and always. No matter where it leads us.” Ignis is turning in his direction. “But you would understand. You would know.”

“Wherever he goes, we go.” He breathes in that presence by his side. That essential shape in the world. “I’d have to lead him. You’d have to follow him. Yeah?”

“If not that: then we could walk side by side, you and I, whether we lead him or we follow him.”

He thinks that over for a moment. “Yeah. We could do that. And when he’s not around?”

It’s still a gift, to hear Ignis laugh: and the sound is artless and startled and completely him. Warm and deep and nestling in Gladio’s chest like a welcome weight, like something he can hold on to.

“Then when there’s time for us -- we take it. We hold on to it.” 

Movement that draws his attention, that makes him move in return: movement that’s Ignis, pressing very carefully against his side. 

He leans toward him, drawn into him, irretrievably.

“I like the sound of that. Time we can take. If that’s what you want. I know where the line is, I crossed it a long time ago, but I’m not doing anything else unless you tell me.”

“What I want is this, Gladiolus: meet me halfway. Meet me on the line -- and we’ll cross it, together.”

He turns, then, and smiles. “Together.” 

And he falls, gratefully, into Ignis.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
